Could you try -master? There has been fairly substantial work since the 2.8 release; all of the tokens in 2.8 are still taking the MP lock as a precaution. That is no longer the case in master. The process token has been broken up fairly dramatically in master as well, so I expect to see different results.

Can you give us a bit more information about the h/w and configuration? In Kris Kennaway's tests, he was seeing FreeBSD 7 sustain 8 times the number of transactions you're reporting for 8.1, and that was for hardware that is three or four years old at this point. Also, last I tried sysbench/OLTP with MySQL on dfly, I saw MySQL making many 256K allocations, which fall back to mmap() in our system. mmap() acquires the VM token, so I expected to see a much more dramatic falloff than you saw.

I guess I wasn't clear earlier, the results on my graph were SMP; the UP lines were not present; the results were from very early in the 2.8 cycle, but I don't have the exact rev handy.